Each of us has a unique path to a happy future. There are two areas that can help us to find that path. The first is to be effective.

But then, a lot of people are effective in being destructive. So there has got to be some kind of way of selecting what you’re being effective about. To be effective you must have some ethics involved or you will find yourself being effective in things that are not very creative. You can be effective in creating enemies. You can be effective at making people mistrust you. Being truly effective as a human being means you must have some ethics. The ethic must be that whatever I do will be creative to the human spirit.

A path to your objectives and purpose

There is a path to anything you want to reach. If you want to go in the front door you walk down the path. Without that path you’d be wandering all over the place. So we need to have a path for ourselves and know those things that will distract us from reaching our purposes and our goals. If you wait until distractions become a block to you, they will divert your attention from a creative pathway to reaching your objectives.

So it is necessary to sweep the path ahead of you. Then you can escape that dreadful state of living in a crisis. In business it is said that crises are unprofitable. They’re confusing and they create a lot of disasters. Don’t have big crises. You handle the crisis while it is small.

Agreement not control

To achieve something you’ve got to improve the communication level, because everything is achieved by agreement.

This great building we are in was achieved by agreement. Somebody sat down and said, “I want to build something, I’ll do something that will create a big effect on Melbourne. I know: we’ll build a magnificent hall”. And his mates come out and say, "Bloody good idea, we'd like to do join in that project". So they get the concept and approach some architects – I believe in this case they went to England – and they got all excited over it and they designed this building, which is so unusual. In fact if you’d never seen it before, the concept might seem ridiculous, looking at it from a conservative point of view. The point is, creating something requires communicating well with lots of people. That is what being creative means.

Happiness and creativity

Everybody wants to be happy.

Everybody wants to be creative. I doubt if there is a person in this theatre that doesn’t want to be happy and creative. But creative to what?

We’re most happy when we’re being creative with those things that make the child in us happy. Achievement is a game, but a serious game. Without the fulfilment of our inner child in the process we are unlikely to succeed in truly creating something wonderful.

You can’t get rid of the child in you. You can’t get rid of the human spirit. You’re stuck with it. And if it is miserable and unsatisfied and it’s not with you any more, it’s not having fun. You don’t need fun yourself, you only enjoy the fun of the child in you.

We should listen to the human. For genuine wisdom we have to listen to the human spirit, to the child. Because I don’t care how clever you are and how educated you are, and how well you can play, there is no wisdom unless you have your human, the child with you, as your guru.

And sometimes it is difficult because sometimes if you listen to your human and you make decisions, not everybody understands why you’ve made those decisions, because they don’t listen to their own. So you’ve got to put up with that, and you do make decisions that make the child in you happy.

Because if you want to experience joy, what are you going to do? As a spirit you don’t have joy, you experience the human’s joy. The human has fun, you experience the child’s fun. Real present time creation of pleasure, original pleasure, occurs when you experience the joy or the pleasure of the human. The child in you.

Being responsible for what you do to others

Unless you experience the effects you create on another person when you communicate to them in any way at all, you don’t know what you’re doing. Let’s face it, it is irresponsible. A person is irresponsible if they do something to someone else and they don’t know what they did. Don’t blame anyone. Because if you blame somebody for your condition in your life, then really you are saying that they are the only one that can fix it up. But you will make no progress in that frame of mind. You must be self-determined, accept responsibility for yourself and the condition of the child within.

Communication is the key

What I am trying to say to you is that there are lots of forms of communication. You can’t learn human communication by getting lots of degrees. It involves empathy and stillness.Communication changes our life. And if you want a good life you’ve got to listen to your human. Because if it is not enjoying its life I can tell you something with absolute certainty, neither are you. You can kid yourself that you are. But by readjusting your consciousness of time and space you can become more aware of your own self and the people you engage with.

There’s a saying in business that an executive should have the long view. The long view means that you’re looking at cause and effect over a long period. You might cause this effect and get a negative response. But you hold still despite the negative response. If you knee-jerk on the first response you’re not going to do anything very much. Because there is a natural resistance to change and if you're trying to create change you're going to get resistance. The only way to get change is to seek it with humour – the human element has to be at the centre.

Creative thought

So if you go back to the source of this building, it started off as an idea. A thought in a person’s mind. So don't knock thought. Thought is very powerful if it is used creatively. Very, very powerful. And sometimes we get so careless about thought, the way we think about each other, and the thoughts we have about each other which are not really very pleasant, they’re not really creative.

If you have a good friend and you start to think bad thoughts about the good friend, after a while the friendship is gone, is that correct? You know that.

You must have experienced that. You don’t have bad thoughts about a friend. You look for the qualities in the friend, or you wouldn’t have a friend. So if you do that with a friend, why not do that with everybody? Why not look at the quality of each person? Because you only get what you look for. I look for the nobility in someone, not the negative,

I look for the nobility in every person. People have enough of those rotten opinions; I don’t need to add to them.

If you look for the capacity of someone to love, that is what you will get back. And that’s called friendship.

If you haven’t supressed the child in you, you will be able to communicate effectively. That is the only area you are going to find any wisdom. And life without wisdom is a drag – it is full of stress, full of frustration – we all become battlers.

So in conclusion let me say to you – keep the path clear. Because the most frequent thing that stops you from achieving what you want to achieve is your own doubt, distractions and negativity. Find out what distracts you from what you decide to do. What your postulates are. You decide to do something, what is going to distract you. Impatience? You’re oriented to win. What distracts you? Your ego? I'm going to tell you something, your ego is just your identity. And if it is so weak that you have to defend it, get rid of it. Create a new one.

Look for and listen to the child within you. There you will find wisdom to sustain you on your path through life and help you reach your objectives. You don’t need a guru, you just need to listen to the wisdom of the inner child and find that playfulness and love which is the essence of being human.